Notes and
Reflections for a talk on Franciscan Mysticism by Maury Smith
1 Introduction mjs.doc
Topics in General Introduction:
Goals of Session
Brief biography of Maury
Reading the sources.
Subjectivity
Perceptual screen.
Mystery
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Goals of this Session:
To give a brief introduction to Francis and Franciscan Mysticism.
To give a few highlights of Franciscan Mysticism as illustrated by
Francis, Bonaventure and Angela of Filigno.
To taste some of the actual texts themselves. Very important.
To apply the Franciscan principle that all knowledge is at the service of spiritual growth, our relationships with the Father, Son and Holy Spirits.
May I recommend that you do not have to do a lot of note taking.
I plan within the next month or so to put my notes and reflections on the internet. I have to edit some to ensure copyrignts.
Maury Smith’s course page: Formation in the Franciscan Tradition
Look for section on Franciscan mysticism. http://in.geocities.com/maurysmith/
Introduction of Maury
As you can see if you know the Franciscan Habit I am a Franciscan.
In fact as of this summer I have been a Franciscan for 50ty years.
One of the most wonderful times in my life is the 14 summers I spent at the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University.
I use to teach a course and sit in on a course.
So I
have the great gift of knowing most of the Franciscan Scholars who reside in
the
One of the stories about Francis towards the end of his life when he was sick was the doctor wanted him to put a patch on his habit near the stomach to keep him warm. Francis insisted on putting a patch on the outside so that all would see what he was doing.
So I want to be transparent about where I am coming from.
I am not a Franciscan scholar. I know this very well since as I have said I know very well a number of our scholars.
My
training is as a pastoral counselor. I have a doctorate and did a post
doctoral internship in Organization Development. When I was ordained in
1966 there was no place in the
My hero is St. Bonaventure who in his time was a theologian, scripture scholar and psychologist all rolled into one. We have split these up in our days. Bonaventure was a genius and a saint, neither of which I am.
I have read that he was the most popular spiritual writer for almost 500 yeas.
So I am a therapist who is most interested in spirituality and so I have studied all the psychologists who are interested in the spirit of the person like Jung, William James, Allport, Roberto Assaigioli, the founder of pyschosynthesis and Ira Progoff and his Intensive Journal. I have also studied as much spiritual theology and scripture as I can. I have taken training workshops in Gestalt Therapy, Neuro-lingquistic programming and am a trained Progoff Intensive Journal consultant.
Before I explain myself as a “spiritual therapist” I would like to reflect on two other important topics as part of this general introduction.
Reading the Franciscan Texts
Reading the Franciscan sources
First of all it is most important to read the original sources themselves.
Not just to merely read about them.
Other hagiographers have a bias that they are attempting to prove about Francis, sometimes they are even polemical.
The introductions by the three editors of the FAED, Armstrong, Hellman and Short,
is a veritable course in Franciscan
Studies, especially as regards to the manuscript tradition and
the orientation of each work.
Site Hagiography from New Cath Ency,
Hellman’s on Spiritual Writings, Genres of NDCS pp. 922-930
All of the texts that we will be reflecting on are from medieval times. Francis, Bonaventure and Angela wrote in the thirteenth century. Any of you who have taken an introduction in scripture studies knows the methodology that has been developed to better understand the texts of scripture. In many ways what our Franciscan scholars have done is to use the methodology developed by scripture scholars and applied it to the Franciscan texts.
Just as contemporary commentaries enable us to better understand the Bible, so the introductions and footnotes of the three volumes of the FAED help us.
In my bibliography are a number works that are helpful in this regard, for example, Hammond, Cusato and Coughlin, Johnson and Dalarun. And I know from verbal communication from Hellmann that a series of commentaries on the FAED is in the works.
In these remarks I wish to make some practical comments about how to read these texts beneficially.
Francis:
The primary difficulty in reading Francis’ writings is that they appear to be very simple when in fact he has a gift for saying very profound reflections in a simple was that can elude us at first. It is only when we take the time to seriously reflect on what he is really saying that we break open his simplicity into its richness.
For Example, let us look at Admonition One. The Bopy of Christ.
14Therefore: children, how long will you be hard of
heart? 15Why do you not know the truth and believe in the Son of God?
16 Behold, each day He humbles Himself
as when He came from the royal throne into the Virgin's womb;'
17 each day He Himself comes to us, appearing humbly;' 18
each day He comes down from the bosom of the Father
upon the altar in the hands of a priest.
19 As He revealed Himself to the holy apostles in true flesh, so He reveals Himself to us now in sacred bread. 20And as they saw only His flesh by an insight of their flesh, yet believed that He was God as they contemplated Him with their spiritual eyes,21 let us, as we see bread and wine with our bodily eyes, see and firmly believe that they are His most holy Body and Blood living and true.22 And in this way the Lord is always with His faithful, as He Himself says: Behold I am with you until the end of the age.
Francis, First Admonition FAED p. 129.
What is Francis saying in these two verses?
Yes, in simple terms he is talking about the Incarnation of Christ.
“Each day He humbles Himself.
But what it Francis saying about he Incarnation.
We tend to think that the Incarnation happened and that is the feast of Christmas that we celebrate and that is finished. The Incarnation happened in the past. It is over.
And yet in our theology we frequently speak of the sacrifice of the Mass as an eternal sacrifice happening for all time and out of our time into everlasting of God.
Francis has a very special understanding of the Eucharist.
Three times he says “each day.”
Each day he humbles Himself as when he came into the Virgin’s womb;
each day He Himself comes to us;
each day he comes from the Father to the altar.
So what we have here is an eternal incarnation.
And this is
concretized within the action of the Eucharist, the
The Incarnation
continues to happen at every
Verses 16 and 17 are an example of the kind of simple statements of Francis that have a profound implication and understanding about Godd.
This is also an example of Francis as a vernacular theologian.
Bonaventure:
As for Bonaventure there is only one way to seriously read him and that is with a pencil or pen in your hand. Or as I like to do scan the text into your computer and outline it. I must admit that Bonaventure is difficult to read. Partly, if I may so, in our day of word overload from everywhere and when so often the words are like baby food. It is difficult to adjust to a genius like Bonaventure who perceives and understands all kinds of relationships and write with such profundity.
But on the other hand it is like panning for Gold with the exception being that we always find gold with Bonaventure. His writings are perceptive, insightful and often almost poetic prose. Later in this talk we will reflect on chapter seven of this Journey of the Person into God. I think you will appreciate that as an example of what I am describing. But make no mistake about it; though difficult, the rewards of reading Bonaventure makes it worthwhile.
Another understanding of Bonaventure and Celano also is that they are theologians and in their writings they have a spiritual theology embedded in their theological biographies of Francis. For example the nine middle chapters of Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior divide into three sections of three chapters each using the purgative, illuminative and unitive spiritualigy of Pseudo-Dionysius. Or one could look at the nine chapters as the nine virtues that enabled Francis to imitate Christ Crucified. By the way Bonaventure has a work on the Pseudo-Dionysius theology called the De Triplici Via.
See Bonaventure. Writings on the Spiritual Life. Works of Bonaventure,
Volume X. Introduction and Notes by F. Edward Coughlin.
Angela:
I cannot
express strongly enough the actual reading of Angela’s Memorial. Only
those who have taken the time to actually read the revelations of a mystic will
appreciate the extraordinary experience it is. It is astonishing. It is
almost overwhelming what a different world view they have. To a certain extent
you almost find yourself thinking: this is unbelievable. Where does
Angela get these ideas. For example, here conversation with the Holy
Spirit, Jesus speaking to her in an intimate way and
Mystery
The older I get the more willing I am to accept the MYSTERY of God and I find theological concepts like prayer, spirituality and mystical difficult because they lead to the ossification of the relationship with God. We use these terms so loosely they can mean anything and in the process we forget what we are really talking about: namely, the living dynamic relationship with God that changes, grows and deepens.
There is a danger with naming and defining. It is what we learned in philosophy about reification. That is when we turn a concept into a thing as if the concept existed in reality as opposed to the reality that concepts are mental constructs that point to reality. There is an expression in an understanding of Milton Erickson’s psychology
as understood by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in their Neuro Linguistic Programming therapy: “the map is not the territory.”
The danger of naming is not only that we might misname but that we might believe that in naming that we know all there is to know about something or someone. We are given to stereotyping that puts an end to searching and exploring a reality or a person. So if we have the illusion that we have a name for God and that we know who God is, then we no longer have a need to develop the relationship.
Several years ago I read a research paper that was done on some contemplatives. One of the conclusions of this study was that contemplatives have a higher capability of facing reality more objectively then the average person. That is to say that they are more willing to face chaos, change, vagueness, the grayness of life and are more willing to let go of control.
I mention these factors because we will not fully understand the mystics unless we are willing to enter into another worldview, another way of perceiving reality, a very different relationship with God. Another way to talk about this is to say that we must avoid over intellectualization and take seriously the experience of our own consciousness. My understanding of Eastern Mysticism is that one comes to union with God through the senses. Notice how often Jesus talks about seeing and hearing and tasting. And this is part of the meaning when theologically we find God in creation.
If the mystics teach us anything it Is that there comes a point in the relationship with God that we can no longer use any adjective to describe God. The experience of the mystics is that they cannot adequately describe God. God is inexpressible, indefinable, unspeakable, unutterable, ineffable. We can choose consciously or unconsciously to remain outside, to be only curious about a mystics relationship with God or we can choose to enter into the MSYTERY.
I take the time to at least mention the research being done because the time has come that we can no longer study mysticism from one viewpoint. We must have an interdisciplinary approach that not only includes theology, scripture, spirituality and the history of mysticism but also includes other cultures and the psychological research that is being done.
One of the stories about Francis at prayer is that he came out of praying a changed man, his continence was bright. It seems to me that any theology of prayer that focuses exclusively on praying as if is exclusively a spiritual thing is a subtle form of dualism. The old body is evil, the soul is good dichotomy. Hopefully we will celebrate the physical benefits of praying as well as the spiritual ones.
I have
found no one who is willing to tackle the complex and difficult clarification
between, for lack of better terminology, the ordinary person’s experience, the
contemplative and the mystic.
I am
reminded of what I have read about the names for snow. Most of the world
only has one name with perhaps a few adjectives. In most of the
Eskimos have fifty names for snow.
When I worked as a professional therapist and even later I have done a tremendous amount of testing of individuals with the MMPI, Shostrom’s Personal Inventory and Schultz’s Firo-B. There are so many variables that make up the personality of an individual that even if two persons test similarly, they are in fact very different because of other factors.
The popular Myer-Briggs Personality Test identifies sixteen types of personalities. I have several friends who have the same type as myself and we do have some similarities but we are also quite different from one another. I say all this to make the point that all the mystics, though they may have similarities are quite different from one another. Once again we are dealing with a profound mystery of God’s creation. In this case the human person. I am fascinated by the enormous variety in nature, for example, all the different kinds of flowers or all the different kinds of dogs, etc. I am also fascinated by all the different kinds of persons, especially all the different faces.
The common elements of MYSTERY in the history of mysticiasm:
”The concept of mystery centers on
the experiential acknowledgment of the absolute transcendence of God
whenever one encounters the divine salvific activity within human history.
Awe and reverence in the presence of the divine mark
all the revelatory experiences that the world's great religions see
as crucial to the Creator-creature relationship.”
From: The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality Editor: Michael Downey
A Michael Glazier Book, THE LITURGICAL
PRESS,
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